I'm waiting for a call back from McDonald's, the hamburger people. They're
trying to find me someone - anyone - within corporate headquarters who knows
what the Internet is and can tell me why there are no Golden Arches on the
information highway.

It's true: there is no mcdonalds.com on the Internet. No burger_king.com
either.

Yet.

"Are you finding that the Internet is a big thing?" asked Jane Hulbert, a
helpful McDonald's media-relations person, with whom I spoke a short while ago.

Yes, I told her. In some quarters, the Internet is a very big thing.

I explained a little bit about what the Big Thing is, and how it works, and
about the Net Name Gold Rush that's going on. I told her how important domain
names are on the Internet ("Kind of like a phone number. It's where you get
your e-mail. It's part of your address."), and I explained that savvy business
folks are racing out and registering any domain name they can think of: their
own company names, obviously, and generic names like drugs.com and sex.com, and
silly names that might have some kind of speculative value one day, like
roadkill.com.

"Some companies," I told Jane Hulbert, "are even registering the names of their
competitors."

"You're kidding," she said.

I am not, I told her, recounting the story of The Princeton Review, the
Manhattan-based company that sells SAT prep courses, and how it registered the
name of its arch-rival, kaplan.com. Now the lawyers are working it out in
court. Very ugly. (We'll get to that later.)

"I could register McDonald's right now," I said, pointing out that the name is
still unclaimed.

"So could Burger King," I said, and Jane Hulbert rang off, looking for some MIS
person with the answers.

How much do you think mcdonalds.com is worth? What could you sell mtv.com for?
Is there gold in them thar domains, as a lot of people seem to think, or is it
just fool's gold? No one knows the answers to these questions, though they are
being asked, very pointedly, in federal court, as well as in the boardrooms of
a number of the nation's biggest companies.

In the meantime, a frenzy of domain-name registration is going on at the
InterNIC, or Internet Network Information Center, the agency that assigns
domain names and rules on requests. It's easy to find an unused domain name,
and so far, there are no rules that would prohibit you from owning a bitchin'
corporate name, trademarked or not.

The InterNIC staff has neither the time nor the inclination to scrutinize your
application. Not too long ago, I spoke to Scott Williamson, the person who
supervises InterNIC registration, to find out what criteria the InterNIC uses
to deny registration requests.

There are situations that raise two red flags, according to Williamson: "If the
name's already taken. Or if we catch an 'obvious one.'"

An "obvious one," he explained, is a blatant attempt to register a name to
which you're not entitled. For in-stance, let's say Sprint Communications
wanted to register MCI, a competitor in the long-distance telephone biz. That
would be an "obvious one" that even the beleaguered staff of the InterNIC would
pick up. But wait a second! In the spring of this year, Sprint did
register the call letters MCI, albeit briefly. For a while Sprint owned
mci.com.

Why did Sprint want to register its rival's name as a domain name? Sprint won't
say, exactly: "For the record, Sprint won't discuss its plans for the domain
name," said Evette Fulton, a spokesperson, who added, for anyone too dumb to
read Sprint's lips, "We're in an extremely competitive business." As soon as
the InterNIC got wind of it a week or so later, mci.com was re-registered to
MCI.

How did such an obvious one get by InterNIC?

"It was a fluke," Williamson said, noting that three requests for the domain
name, mci, came in almost simultaneously. (One request was from MCI itself, one
was from Sprint, and one was from another company whose initials were MCI.)
"All three came in, and the guy in registration registered the wrong one."

The guy in registration? One person is responsible for assigning domain
names on the Internet?

Actually, "We have 2.5 people doing it," Williamson said, meaning that the half
person is really a full person doing it part-time. Or something. Regardless,
2.5 humans is not enough people, or parts of people, to do the job. (Would one
person be assigning quit-claims to a gold rush?)

Williamson said that a year ago, his agency received 300 requests a month for
domain names; now, more than 1,300 requests stream in each
month.

Joshua Quittner covers cyberspace for Newsday. He's the co-author of Masters of Deception: The Gang that Ruled Cyberspace, to be published by HarperCollins in January. Andrew Rozmiarek conducted research for this piece.